The four-inch blade severed an artery in his leg and he needed life-saving surgery at James Cook University Hospital, Middlesbrough.

Prosecutor Christine Egerton said one of the couple’s neighbours heard O’Neill shout: “I'll have you, I'll have you”, before she then told him to die.

In November 1991, O’Neill stabbed her then husband with a five-inch fisherman’s knife, and was given two years’ probation for wounding with intent.

Miss Egerton told Teesside Crown Court O’Neill and Mr McLernon had both been drinking on Friday, July 25, last year, when an argument broke out at the home they had shared for 18 months.

The court heard how she punched him, he may have punched her, and she ran into the kitchen. He held the door shut to keep her inside, but after a while he let go and he ran outside into a parking area.

She ran at him with the kitchen knife and she stabbed him in the inner upper thigh, his bottom and his shoulder.

Miss Egerton added: “He said she was stabbing him just too fast, there was nothing he could do to stop her.

“He collapsed on the floor and he saw the blood spurting out like a fountain. She did not say anything to him during the stabbing but he said something like ‘There's no need for this’.

“She left him in the street groaning and injured, went into the house and re-emerged holding her bleeding hand. She had a cut finger, which the Crown say was self-inflicted deliberately.”

An ambulance and police officers went to the scene and it was discovered that he had a serious wound in his left side which could have proved fatal if he had not received medical treatment.

When O’Neill was arrested and interviewed she claimed that he had the knife first, she pulled it from him and she stabbed herself in the process. Peter Johnson, defending, said that drink played a part in the incident, and it was clear that Mr McLernon had experienced problems with drink in the past.

The Recorder of Middlesbrough Judge Peter Fox QC told her: “A psychiatrist laid out in great detail what a hard life you had from the very beginning.

“While it does not give you an excuse for what you did it gives me an insight.” O’Neill of Trinity Court, Guisborough, was jailed for five years after she pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. The Crown accepted her plea of not guilty to attempted murder.